[Foundation-l] Left on the Table

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 00:53, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
> An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven:
>> How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the
>> table each year?
>>
>> Fred
>
> According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of
> 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to
> Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is
> US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an
> extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value.
> Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and
> ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and
> interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand
> Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive
> ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has
> (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just
> a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue
> as Facebook without additional employees.
>
> Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable.

Thanks for making approximation!

I was thinking that WMF and chapters would have much more money with
ads. However, ~$100M is not so bigger amount than $20-22M. Besides
that, all chapters except WM DE are far from reaching the limits
(while WM DE is not so close to reach the limits). Also, organizations
should have capacities to spend money, which should be built through
the time.

In other words, it seems that we definitely don't need ads.